Metal silver has been widely used as a recording material, a material for the printing plate, and also as a highly conductive material because of its excellent conductivity. Typically, when employing metal silver to such applications, a technique is adopted, in which a silver ink composition containing metal silver or a component which is a metal silver forming material is prepared, the composition is deposited onto the printing substrate by various printing methods, and, if necessary, the deposited composition is heated (fired) in order to form a coating film of metal silver. In order to form a fine pattern of metal silver, ink jet printing is generally used as the printing method.
As a silver ink composition suitable for the application to an ink jet printing method as described above, those obtained by dispersing the silver nanoparticles in various organic solvents have been disclosed (see Patent Documents 1 and 2).